Clint Mansell

Even though Danny Elfman seemingly had the market cornered on rock-stars-turned-film-composers, that all changed when Clint Mansell was hired by friend and director Darren Aronofsky to compose his first score. Mansell's first brush with fame came as the frontman/guitarist of English alt-rock group, Pop Will Eat Itself. When the band broke up in 1996, he moved to the United States where he almost immediately became the de facto composer for up-and-coming director Aronofsky, who hired him to write the music for his 1998 debut, "Pi." Mansell soon served as the go-to composer for Aronofsky in much the same way that John Williams does for Steven Spielberg. He's written the music for the filmmaker's subsequent projects "Requiem for a Dream," "The Fountain," "The Wrestler," and "Black Swan." Mansell's work with Aronofsky also got him hired to create a reworked version of "Lux Aeterna" from "Requiem for a Dream" for use in a number of film trailers ("The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers"; "Zathura"; "The Da Vinci Code"). Even though Mansell participated in a brief 2005 PWEI reunion, his return to film scoring took a slightly lighter turn. Counterbalancing the heavier subject matter often at the heart of Aronofsky's work, Mansell worked on a number of romantic comedies including "Definitely, Maybe," "Trust the Man," and "The Rebound."